The present invention consists in a fixing device for fixing a wire to a support member provided with at least two openings.
The problem often arises of having to fix a wire to a support member, for example to fix a welded wire mesh structure, for example a wire cable tray.
Wire mesh cable trays known in the art comprise wires of two different types, namely, and firstly, longitudinal wires, commonly called warp wires, which run longitudinally and in a rectilinear or quasi-rectilinear manner the whole of their length and, secondly, disposed transversely from place to place along these longitudinal wires, and being appropriately fixed thereto, U-shaped transverse wires, commonly called weft wires, the overall combination forming three panels, namely a bottom panel and two lateral panels, commonly called flanges, which are in practice plane or substantially plane.
These wire cable trays are routinely used, in the manner of a gutter, to support, house and protect electrical and like cables.
Here, and hereinafter, the term “electrical cables” means not only cables suitable for transporting and distributing electrical energy, but also cables and fibers adapted to transmit information electrically, optically or otherwise.
With reference to electrical cables, wire cable trays have many advantages that have made them popular with electrical installers, and in particular advantages of easy installation, and therefore economy, of flexibility, it being additionally possible to extract the electrical cables through any of their meshes, of transparency, and therefore easy identification of the electrical cables, of ventilation, of cleanliness, of safety, as much for the electrical cables as for users, and of performance.
It has already been proposed, for fixing this kind of mesh structure, for example in the document FR-A-2 697 690, to use a fixing section having a plane surface adapted to receive the bottom of the cable tray and provided with lugs adapted to cooperate with the bottom wires of the cable tray.
According to the above document, a sheet-metal fixing section has a plane surface on which longitudinal wires of a cable tray welded to U-shaped transverse wires rest. The plane surface of the section has at least two elongate openings formed by cutting out and bending the lugs. Before the fixing operation as such is carried out, the lugs are shaped to form a tongue that extends parallel to the plane surface of the section and at a distance from that plane surface globally equal to the diameter of the longitudinal bottom wires.
To fix the cable tray, it is placed on the plane surface of the section and moved in translation to place the bottom wires under the tongues of the lugs until they abut against the junction of the tongue with the plane surface of the section. The bottom wires repeat at predetermined intervals and the position of the lugs must of course correspond to those intervals. To complete the fixing operation, it suffices to bend the tongues of the lugs around the longitudinal bottom wires, toward the plane surface of the section, using any tool or preferably using an appropriate tool.
This way of fixing a mesh structure is satisfactory, but has several drawbacks: the section with lugs matches only one type of wire mesh cable tray, with which it is intended to cooperate, the distance between the lugs having to correspond exactly to that between the longitudinal wires of the cable tray. Moreover, it is necessary to have sections with lugs specific to one supplier.